My lack of enthusiasm for them, however, did not stop most of them from turning up anyway. Since the first time I had found a maimed rabbit in a trap, I had begun posting Do Not Trespass signs. When that didn’t work, I began doing semiregular sweeps through the parts of the woods that were actually mine.
I’d learned to recognize the different kinds of traps when I went out for my long walks. I had gotten good at disarming the metal contraptions and gathering them up to hand over to Sheriff Bingley.
I planned to take the night off from patrolling, though. It was Christmas Eve, and all I really wanted to do was curl up by my fireplace with a hot drink and a book.
But as I passed the first turn-off onto my property, I spun the steering wheel to guide my Jeep onto the bumpy drive almost unconsciously. My cabin was farther up the mountain.
This drive would take me to some of the poachers’ favorite hunting grounds.
When I first moved up here, I’d discovered an old trailhead that wound its way up through the woods, crisscrossing in and out of my land. It seemed to be a fairly regular path used by poachers. I was always careful to watch for other people when I took it. I rarely checked it this late, though.
I’ll just do a quick sweep of the first two clearings, I promised myself.
When I parked and stepped out of the Jeep, however, out of the woods came a noise like nothing I’d heard before, a high-pitched sound somewhere between a scream and a yowl.
I jumped, startled, and pulled the pistol I still carried out of the glove compartment, where I had left it during the festival.
I hoped I wasn’t about to come upon an injured cougar. Or bear. Idiot poachers are likely to catch anything in the traps.
I took the holster belt I kept in the back of the Jeep and strapped it on. If it was nothing, I could holster the weapon. But for now, I was keeping it drawn.
I moved slowly up the path, every step sounding louder than the previous one as it crunched into the snow, certain to scare off any wildlife around. Except maybe the cougar or bear.
As I stepped into the first clearing, the moon moved out from behind a cloud, illuminating the scene before me.
A large fox—bigger than the ones I was used to catching glimpses of now and then in the forest—had been caught in a bear trap. It lay on the snow, panting. The leg in the trap was bent at an awkward angle, almost certainly broken.
Its chest heaved with rapid breaths.
I didn’t think a fox that torn up could survive.
Damn those poachers. Tears welled up in my eyes. “I’m going to have to put you out of your misery, I’m afraid.”
The animal opened his eyes and looked up at me, and for a split second, I could’ve sworn I saw an almost human intelligence there. But then they clouded over again and closed.
I hated this part of cleaning up after poachers who couldn’t be bothered to put out traps that either killed cleanly or caught the animals alive without hurting them.
I’d left Dallas because I couldn’t stand what people do to people. Out here, I couldn’t stand what they did to animals.
I sighed. “I’m so sorry.”
But just as I was about to pull the trigger, the fox’s entire shape flickered. I stopped and blinked twice, closing my eyes tightly for a second and shaking my head to see if I could figure out what had just happened.
And that’s when the fox turned into a naked man.
3. Bennet
WHEN SHE’D ENTERED the clearing, I had stared at her, shimmering in the moonlight. I couldn’t tell what she was. She wasn’t one of the monstrous elves that had been chasing me, though she almost glowed like they did.
She wasn’t one of the kinds of supernaturals I knew about. Not a shifter, and not one of the darker creatures like the bloodsuckers, or the other monsters that prey upon the weak.
All of this flashed through my mind in an instant.
Then she’d turned her gun on me. She was going to shoot me. If I’d been in my human form, I would have laughed at the irony. I had spent so much time and effort running from the creatures hunting me, and now I was going to be put down like a wounded animal by someone who was doing it out of kindness.
Humans. They never did the right thing, even when they were trying to.
If I died, my family would never know what happened me—and worse, they’d be at risk from the very same evil elves I was trying to save them from. As long as the elves hunted me, the rest of my clan stayed hidden.
So I put all my effort into one final chance, despite the fact that I was exhausted. I knew shifting now was dangerous. I could die from it. I needed to sleep, to rest first. And part of me even thought that one instant of agony with the bullets might be worth the permanent rest afterwards.
If I shifted, there would be no rest—my leg bone would heal and break again inside the trap.
But I had to give it one last try in the hopes she wouldn’t shoot me. So I closed my eyes and reached down inside myself, circling into that place that held my fox and my human selves, and I pulled as hard as I could.
Something inside me snapped when I tugged at the power, the result as sharp and painful as the broken bone in my leg.
There wasn’t much left, maybe just enough to give her a glimpse of my other form. I didn’t think I could manage a whole shift. I wrapped all the energy around myself and opened my eyes to match my gaze with hers. I could feel it working, feel the change flowing through my very cells. I imagined them bumping into one another, like blood cells under a microscope. Rushing through the channels that existed for them to get to their designated places.
I felt it when they snapped into formation, moving into the configuration for human and out of the one for fox.
The woman froze, her eyes huge. I held the form for one heartbeat. Two...three. Pushing the whole time against my cells’ desire to slide back into fox.
As soon as the hand holding the gun dropped down to her side, I heaved a sigh and let go. As soon as I no longer strained to hold it, my human shape slipped away, like melting snow, disappearing into the ground around me, leaving only the fox behind. As I’d expected, my leg snapped again, and I yelped once against my will.
“What the hell was that?” the woman muttered to herself, and I knew she meant my human form, not the sound of pain I’d made. She blinked and passed her hand over her eyes.
All around me, Debourgh’s warriors whispered, their voices shuddering through the forest like wind through the leaves.
Not true. Not real. Not yours. Ours.
Normally, from what I’d seen, that whispering was enough to push a human’s thinking in a certain direction.
But this woman was made of sterner stuff.
Or maybe more supernatural stuff.
As I looked at her now, the strange bluish glow I had seen in the beginning had disappeared. She just looked like any normal human.
But I was certain there was more to her than what I was seeing now.
Especially when she whipped around at the sound of one of the elves slipping through the forest behind her. “Who’s out there?” She turned again. “You cannot hunt on this land.”
I wanted to shake my head—I would if I weren’t so damn tired. She couldn’t stop the fae from hunting me. Not in the woods. The woods were theirs.
Another whispering laugh came from the forest. She shouldn’t have been able to hear it with her human ears, but she responded to it, turning around and shouting into the trees. “These woods are mine. This land is mine. You cannot hunt here. Do you hear me? These woods are mine!”
As the echo of her final words died away, a wind swirled through the clearing, sending ice and snow with it in tiny eddies along the ground. A biting cold followed the wind, piercing me like knives, or like fingers questing through me, as if to test me.
The cold, too, receded—but in its wake the elves in the forest hissed in pain, pulling even farther back from the clearing, separated from us now by a shimmering blue light encircling us.
Before, the hunter’s trap kept the fae from approaching, with its iron and its human workmanship.
Now, though, the woman had erected a barrier with her words alone.
She had claimed this land, and the fae could not approach her. Or me, as long as I was in here with her.
I stared at her in fascination, even as I felt exhaustion begin to overcome me completely.
What the hell are you?
4. Darcy
I FULLY BELIEVE IN the magic of Christmas.
The “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” kind of Christmas magic that puts faith and joy in the hearts and minds of both children and adults but is never seen.
I don’t believe in any sort of “this fox caught in a poacher’s bear trap in the snowy woods near my home just turned into a dude—still caught in a bear trap—and then back into a fox” kind of Christmas magic.
Because that’s not the unseen joy of Christmas.
That’s the “I just had a psychotic break” terror of Christmas.
Well, shit.
Heaving a huge sigh, I stared at the animal caught in the trap for a good long while. It gave me a steady, beseeching look, its eyes creepily human.
Then again, the rest of it had been creepily human just a moment before.
“Now I’m going to have to take you home, aren’t I?” I glared at the animal. “I ought to leave you here, let you die of exposure.”
The fox closed its eyes and lowered its head as if in resignation.
“Dammit to hell.” I holstered my gun and moved toward the trap. “If you bite me, I’m going to...” I couldn’t figure out what I could do that was worse than the threat of shooting him in the head or leaving him out in the cold. And since I clearly wasn’t going to do either of those things, I just let my thought trail off.
“Wait here. I’m going for a bolt-cutters. I won’t be long.” Luckily I had some in my Jeep. This wasn’t the first time I’d used them to destroy a bear trap. Usually, though, they were empty traps.
“I’m only doing this because I have clearly already lost my mind,” I assured the fox. “I figure if I’m already hallucinating, I might as well invest fully in the psychosis.”
I considered what I’d seen and how it connected to the possibility that I really was having some kind of mental episode.
One of the psychs who’d worked with us regularly back when I was on the force had told me some stories about ways she had done what she called “calling out psychotic beliefs.” Mostly her methods had to do with creating a facsimile of reality that mimicked the specifics of a hallucinations. Apparently claiming you heard voices coming out of your wall sockets was all well and good until someone put microphones in them to create real voices coming out of the wall sockets.
That particular psychologist had been good at figuring out when people were lying to her.
But her methods wouldn’t work for me, since my hallucination was about a shapeshifting man-fox.
What would that be? A were-fox?
The ice crunching under my boots felt real enough, as did the cold air numbing my cheeks and nose.
At the Jeep, I tugged the rear door open and rummaged around in my box of tools. Finding the bolt-cutters, I pulled them out. But when I shut the hatch again, I paused.
I could leave. Walk away. I don’t ever have to acknowledge that I was here.
I couldn’t, though. The more I considered the world around me, the saner I felt. The cold was real, and the snow, and my Jeep, and the trees around me. This had none of the foggy qualities of a dream. And if it was real, I needed to figure out what had actually happened back there.
So, I turned and headed back to the fox in the trap.
He was just as I had left him: quiet and still, with his eyes closed. This time, when I wasn’t stunned by what I was seeing, I took a little more time to examine the fox closely.
He was caught in the bear trap—but like most bear traps, it was designed to hold the animal in place, not ravage it, so other than its broken leg, the fox shouldn’t have had anything worse than bruising, or maybe a few punctures.
But something had attacked it. Something with wicked claws. Maybe a mountain lion? The poor creature had long strips of its skin ripped away, though they were not currently bleeding.
“Okay,” I said, still speaking to the creature as if I were certain what I had seen was true and it really could understand me. “I’m going to be as careful with you as I can be, but this still may hurt because of your injuries.”
I began putting pressure on the bear-trap springs to see if I could release the animal before I destroyed the trap, but then I paused. “Uh. Don’t turn into a human right now, okay? That’ll make it harder for me to get you out.”
The fox opened its eyes, held my gaze steadily, and then nodded.
Oh, fuck.
This was the weirdest night of my life. Like, ever.
5. Bennet
WHAT THE HELL IS SHE?
The woman’s words had somehow acted as a barrier—but I was pretty sure she didn’t know it.
Kneeling in the snow beside me, she’d also holstered her pistol, but I noticed she didn’t snap the holster closed. She was ready to draw on anyone who approached us, even as she put pressure on the springs to try to open the bear trap.
“I don’t know what you are,” she said.
Right back at you, lady.
“But I can’t leave you out here to die. It might even be kinder to put one in your head, but after seeing whatever that was, I can’t do it. This is going to hurt, and if you understand me, I am so sorry.”
Planting one foot for leverage, she grasped the bear trap with both hands and pushed it wide. “I can’t get you out. You’ll have to pull yourself out of the trap and then, if you understand me, don’t run away. Please.”
Oh, I wasn’t running anywhere. I didn’t know if she could tell my bone was broken, but I could—especially when I started trying to move. I managed to pull my leg in closer to my body, but I yelped in pain when I did.
“Hurry,” she said through gritted teeth. “This thing is set tight. It’s going to shut any minute.”
I believe that.
Using only my front paws, I dragged myself out of the trap.
In one movement, she let go of the trap and leapt back. It snapped closed again, and she brushed her hands together and then wiped them down her canvas pants, leaving iron oxide trails of rusty brown behind.
“Okay. Let’s see if we can get you back to my place. I’ll call... a vet? A doctor? Someone. Maybe.”
She stripped off her outer coat, revealing jeans and a heavy red sweater. I shivered at the sight of her, though my fur was keeping me perfectly warm.
I think I’m going into shock.
She spread the coat out on the ground, and I had enough energy left to crawl onto it.
“Let me deal with this, and then we’ll get going,” she murmured. With the bolt-cutters, she snipped the bear-trap apart at some of its most crucial joints, presumably to keep it from being used again.
“Normally, I would sling it over my shoulder and take it with me to turn into the sheriff,” she continued her quiet, one-sided conversation with me. “But this time, I’ll have to send Sheriff Bingley up to check it out. Later.”
She paused to wrap the coat around me, using the arms to tie it around my midsection.
“I’m going to lift you up and then carry you to my Jeep.” Her voice dropped. “God, I hope you don’t bite,” she muttered.
I would not have bitten her anyway, but I doubted I’d be able to right now. I suspected I was about to pass out.
For a second, I worried about leaving the ring of protection she had somehow called up around us. But maybe it wouldn’t matter. If the Jeep was nearby, the metal in its construction should keep me safe from the fae.
Her hands were gentle as she lifted me up, but I couldn’t help whimpering at the way it jostled my broken bone.
“I’m so sorr
y,” she said. “It won’t take long.”
She wrapped me in the coat and gathered me up in her arms. I clenched my jaw against making more noises, even though the pain grew steadily worse. She was saving my life—I had no doubt about that.
I managed to keep my eyes open until we were in the Jeep. That short stretch between the strange barrier she had erected and the vehicle made me anxious. I kept my eyes open, watching carefully. And Debourgh’s warriors flitted around us—but they never got close enough to the woman for her to catch sight of them again. Even so, she, too, was nervous—she kept glancing around us. When she put me in the Jeep, opening the passenger door and setting me gently on the seat, I huffed out a breath of relief. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to relax as much as the pain in my leg would allow.
By the time she moved around to the driver’s side and started the vehicle, I was barely awake. For the first time in days, I felt safe enough to allow myself the relief of unconsciousness.
I drifted in and out of consciousness as the woman drove, sometimes glancing up to see the curve of her jaw limned in silver. At first, I thought it was the reflected glow of the dashboard lights, but the more I watched her, the more certain I became that it was the return of that glow I’d see from her in the clearing.
And then she began singing in a low voice, a kind of wordless hum that I saw spinning out of her mouth in silver-blue smoke. It filled the Jeep and when it touched me, it took away my pain.
6. Darcy
I STOOD JUST INSIDE the door of my cabin, holding what was either the embodiment of my fevered imagination or an actual shapeshifting creature that changed from fox to human.
“Does that really make you a werefox? What do you call yourself?”
He didn’t answer, of course. At some point as I’d settled him in the front seat of my Jeep, he had either fallen asleep or lost consciousness.
Most Ardently Page 14
